


Gremlins Calling

by delilahdraken



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tron (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2013-01-05
Packaged: 2017-11-23 19:42:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/625838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delilahdraken/pseuds/delilahdraken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wishes have power. Some wishes have more power than others. -- OR -- How Rinzler adopts Spike as his new personal User.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gremlins Calling

The Sea of Simulation.

A place of uncountable possibilities in infinite variations.

Some say this is where imagination found its way into existence, where life was born from simpleness. A beginning.

Others say that this ocean is the origin of chaos. A virus is supposed to hide in its vast darkness, always lurking, always waiting for the lost and forgotten. They say this is where destruction comes from.

Those who hope to know think that the Sea is a barrier between one world and another. They imagine that beyond the waters and the gleaming portal within a shiny realm of perfection awaits them, a place from where their gods look upon their lives and find it worthy.

Those who really know often wish they had never found the knowledge, for they see the ocean as what it is. A construct of ideas caged behind the walls of a digitized prison. The Sea is the same as everything in the world it inhabits. Bits and bytes, ones and zeros and the void between one data cluster and the next. Nothing but the kind of magic that can only live inside of technology.

The knowing wish for the simple belief of their brethren that everything, absolutely everything, can be changed at the touch of a deity's hand. Not always made better, as the gods are as fallible and mortal as everybody else, but at least controlled by someone who knew marginally more about these things. Supposedly, that is.

The knowing wish to not know. They wish to forget what cannot be forgotten.

The knowing simply wish.

They wish and somewhere, somewhen a man who swore to never sell his best friend's old home signs a contract that allows the military to test some technology he found in the building's cellar. He thinks he made a good deal selling an old laser that never worked in the first place.

And later, when curious scientists find the only piece of usable data in the machine and someone kicks at it in frustration, the laser that never worked finally does.

Something gets out.

***

He wakes up in pain.

Everything hurts, from little toes up to the roots of his hair. His head feels as if someone took a chainsaw to it.

"You'll pay for this, Slayer," he says. Then he opens his eyes and has to close them just as fast.

The world around him is white. White sky, white ground, white everywhere. White so clean and bright that the mere thought of it burns itself into the eye and leaves a shadow.

He turns his head. There he finally finds colour. Men in uniforms and lab coats walk along with the kind of studious tempo that seems to only reside in the best universities or war zones. He knows what he's talking about, he's seen both more than enough.

"You'll really pay for this, Slayer." This time his voice is louder, more in control and definitely more angry. He gets to his feet and walks right through the open wall of the alcove he had been lying in.

Which is what he had planned to do. Instead he ran face first into a wall of glass. Electrified glass, to be precise. He did not like the sensation at all. So he started hitting and kicking the glass.

A soft splat came from behind him. The very sound that is produced by plastic bags filled with liquid falling from height and ripping open upon arriving on the ground.

Great, he thinks. Now the floor is all bloody. Waste of good food, that is.

He blinks and wonders where that thought came from.

Then the lights dim and a shrill alarm sounds. Soldiers run along. He hears them call for reinforcement. Shots. Quite a lot of shots. More shots that he thought would be needed to slow even the most indestructable demon down a bit.

Silence.

A long while later what seems to him a small army of battle ready soldiers walks to an empty cell right across his own. In the middle of this flood of guns and camuflage a gurney is pushed into the cell. What is on the gurney is black and shiny and purrs like a giant cat on steroids. It also seems to be very much out of commision for the moment.

The soldier's fear in the air is so thick it could be cut with a knife, he thinks. Some part of him is actually impressed.


End file.
